William Gibson

Multilingual Tito engages in sensitive information transfers from his single-room warehouse apartment, while investigative journalist Hollis frets over his start-up magazine's censure of its own promotions, and prescription drug addict Milgrim wonders about the military connections of an enigmatic benefactor. 250,000 first printing.

Spook Country

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Fifteen minutes later, having done the best she could with all that had never been quite right, she descended to the lobby in a Philippe Starck elevator, determined to pay its particulars as little attention as possible. She’d once read an article about Starck that said the designer owned an oyster farm where only perfectly square oysters were grown, in specially fabricated steel frames. The doors slid open on an expanse of pale wood. The Platonic ideal of a small oriental carpet was projected across part of this from somewhere overhead, stylized squiggles of light recalling slightly less stylized squiggles of dyed wool.

Odile was the least chic Frenchwoman Hollis could recall having met, though in a kind of haute-nerd Euro way that only made her more annoyingly adorable.

It was like shoes and accessories, Milgrim thought; someone does alligator, the next week they’re all doing it.

she walked back to the Mondrian through that weird, evanescent moment that belongs to every sunny morning in West Hollywood, when some strange perpetual promise of chlorophyll and hidden, warming fruit graces the air, just before the hydrocarbon blanket settles in.

Artists or the military. That’s something that tends to happen with new technologies generally: the most interesting applications turn up on the battlefield, or in a gallery.’

And it hadn’t hurt that Bobby was himself a musician, though not in the old plays-a-physical-instrument-and/ or-sings modality. He took things apart, sampled them, mashed them up. This was fine with her, though like General Bosquet watching the charge of the Light Brigade, she was inclined to think it wasn’t war. Inchmale understood it, though, and indeed had championed it, as soon as it was digitally possible, pulling guitar lines out of obscure garage chestnuts and stretching them, like a mad jeweler elongating sturdy Victorian tableware into something insectile, post-functionally fragile, and neurologically dangerous.

‘She drove past me in a very nice-looking car. Headed in the direction of Beverly Hills.’ ‘She’s been headed in that direction since the birth canal.’

They passed a Brobdingnagian futon, in whose squishy depths a covey of vicious, asshole-chewing, hyena-like, and exceptionally pretty young people reclined with their drinks.

The door opened like some disturbing hybrid of bank vault and Armani evening purse, perfectly balanced bombproof solidity meeting sheer cosmetic slickness.

The pop star, as we knew her’–and here he bowed slightly, in her direction–‘was actually an artifact of preubiquitous media.’ ‘Of–?’ ‘Of a state in which "mass" media existed, if you will, within the world.’ ‘As opposed to?’ ‘Comprising it.’

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